Phil Cornwell hopes to make a good impression with ‘Cockney geezer’ Fringe show

Phil Cornwell’s character in his first Edinburgh Fringe show for nine years is a bit of an enigma.

He’s called Robert Lemon Alackadaddy, a genial, slightly disturbed alcoholic in denial whose name has an intriguing source.

“Alackadaddy is actually from Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road,” says Phil, a regular on our TV screens for the past 30-odd years.

“I’ve read it a lot over the years and I thought it was such a great word. He only used it once as a sort of expression of ‘Oh, well’ or ‘What the heck’ and I nicked it as a surname.

“The character comes away with a few literary references, which is good because he’s a geezer and you wouldn’t expect it from him, to be talking about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Kafka.

“That’s part of the fun of it, he’s quite well read but he sounds like a right oik.

“He’s a geezer, all ‘Know wot I mean?’. He’s very Cockney so I don’t know how it will go over, there’s a lot of slang in it.”

Well, that should not be a problem as Cockney has become almost a universal language now. It’s not like the old days when it would not be understood outside the sound of Bow Bells.

We’ve had EastEnders for more than 30 years and we’ve got Love Island helping make Cockney – or perhaps Mockney – the standard street patois all over the country.

“I know. I think the old Cockney accent’s going to die out, though, because it’s morphed into a more ‘Jafaikan’ accent, a sort of London/West Indian mash-up with all the kids saying ‘laaik’ every second word,” he says.

“It’s a natural evolution from the old Cockney geezers but I do love their old accent. It’s actually quite aggressive, people don’t warm to it.”

Maybe that is because people are used to hearing it coming through the swirling Dickensian fog and there’s Jack the Ripper, or being spoken by gruff gangster types, often played by Ray Winstone.

“It’s got connotations with crime and the dark side of things, the Krays and all that, hasn’t it?” he says.

“But it is a wonderful old accent. It’s not the prettiest accent, is it? It’s odd how accents change people’s perceptions of you, isn’t it?”

Phil is responsible for one of the few impressions my son does.

He was obsessed with the Italian Job film and computer game, for which Mr C reprised some of Sir Michael Caine’s legendary lines.

As a result, sometimes when I pick him up he’ll announce in his best mock Cockney: “This car belongs to the Pakistani ambassador.”

“That was a long time ago,” laughs the 61-year-old, whose six children range in age from postgraduate to 10 months. “That’s quite sweet, I like that. Does he do a good Michael Caine?”

Not as good as Phil, whose facility with voices saw him become a regular on Dead Ringers and was perfect for Stella Street, the tale of a Surbiton street on which every celeb – big or small – that lived saw him play everyone from Caine to David Bowie and Jimmy Hill.

“It was a tremendous idea and I look back on it fondly and the Rolling Stones running Mick and Keith’s Corner Shop was just perfect – of course they would.

“I was doing David and Jagger long before then, on Steve Wright In The Afternoon when he was on Radio 1 and they’ve been good to me, those impressions.”

Phil is also an accomplished character actor, having appeared in Only Fools And Horses and Hustle. And he says of his return to the Edinburgh Fringe: “I’m not doing too many impressions on this jaunt, though. Alackadaddy is more about different characters cropping up.

“I thought for a while I might have a clean break from the impressions and this is more about the character and his fantasy world and the things that come out of his head – but that will involve Anthony Hopkins and Robert De Niro doing stand-up comedy try-out spots.”

De Niro doing stand-up instantly makes me think of his sensational turn as the excruciating Rupert Pupkin, the wannabe comic who kidnaps Jerry Lewis to get on the box in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant The King Of Comedy.

“Oh, yes, of course, that had occurred to me. But this isn’t De Niro trying to be a real stand-up like Rupert Pupkin, it’s like him as a New York gangster doing gags about wise guys and mooks – ‘How many wise guys does it take to change a light bulb?’, all that kind of stuff.

“I won’t be doing Jagger and Michael Caine. I’ve done that and I’m not knocking it but I actually enjoy doing Hopkins and De Niro so I’ve crowbarred them in.”